


On Our Way to Being OK

by anACTUALmess



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Cannon compliant, Don't worry, Other, Past events and personal trauma referenced, References an RPG system, References to Relationships, Will tag it when I can remember what it's called
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25834648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anACTUALmess/pseuds/anACTUALmess
Summary: Steven is out to see the world. With as many strange things that have happened in Beach City, the world is equally if not stranger and sometimes so much darker. Optimism is a powerful thing and one can always find light in the darkness, keeping the monsters at bay, but it's a monster in and of itself when you try to hide behind it. As a stranger tells him, sometimes you're not okay, you're not always going to be okay, and that's okay too. That's what friends are there for.
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

Monsoons were something that Steven what only now becoming accustomed to. Rain? Rain wasn’t strange. No, it was the sudden appearance of thunder, lightning, and torrential downpours that left nothing but a curtain of grey in any direction he tried to look. Only minutes ago, it had been a bright if not sunny day that was perfect for a drive. Now, Steven couldn’t even see the road five feet in front of him. By some luck, he had been passing through a small town and pulled into the parking lot of a small café. There was a lit flickering open sign hanging in the window and a person or two inside the building. If he was lucky, they would be friendly and have something warm to eat or drink to chase away the chill. Steven locked the van and made a run for the café door, feeling as though buckets of water were being dumped across his back.

A small bell chimed as he burst in through the door, alerting the few patrons present of his entrance. There was an old woman sitting in a corner booth reading a book. She had a purple checkered shawl wrapped around her shoulders and a steaming cup of hot tea. At a bar like counter near the back of the café was a row of black iron barstool chairs and a woman in jeans, a brown leather jacket and long black hair sitting with her back to the door. Behind the counter some ways away from the woman at the counter was a man in black slacks and a white button down shirt. His features looked stone-like and sharp, buzz cut salt and pepper hair along with lines that screamed he’d seen some things despite the calm manner in which he wiped down various mugs and glasses.

The man behind the counter looked up and gave Steven a brief nod before eyeing the puddle of water slowly accumulating where he was standing. It probably wasn’t good for the dark wood floor the café seemed to have but the man said nothing. Steven smiled sheepishly and went to take a seat at the bar, figuring the bar stools would hold up better to his sopping wet clothes. The woman sitting a few seats away from him to his left gave him the barest glance; it wasn’t friendly but it wasn’t unwelcoming either. It was just a look.

The woman turned away and gestured for the man behind the counter to come over. They had a brief, quiet exchange of words and the man nodded. At the other end of the counter was an espresso machine and a small coffee grinder. The man’s movements were careful and unrushed as he put together a hot beverage. He never once touched the coffee grinder but eventually finished off the drink he was making with a generous helping of whipped cream. The man brought the cup over and set it in front of Steven without so much as a word, only another very brief nod.

“Thanks, I,” Steven started, but the man walked back to the other end of the counter before he could get another word out. He looked at the mug and the man and woman to his left at the bar. The man had gone back to cleaning his mugs and the woman was sipping her own drink as though nothing had changed. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t pay for the drink anyway, so Steven went ahead and drank it down. Hot chocolate. It tasted like home, somehow, and the warm drink what just what he needed after getting caught in a rainstorm like that. Steven turned back toward the front of the café to watch the rain, waiting to see the typical and equally sudden break in the dreary weather. Ten minutes passed. Another fifteen came and went. Eventually it came up to about an hour and still, the rain was coming down in heavy sheets.

“Don’t get your hopes up, kid,” the woman sitting a few seats away said. “The rain comes on like a monsoon but it stays for a good long while when it gets here.”

The woman’s dark hair completely obscured one eye and her jacket was zipped up to just below her collar. Steven could now see that she was wearing some heavy looking black boots. She even had black leather gloves on, oddly enough. She didn’t look particularly mean but he sensed something like a shadow over her. The woman glanced in his direction and he could see her one unobscured eye clearly now, darker than obsidian. Darker than the shadows cast across the room by the café’s ceiling lights. Darker than nights with no stars or moon. It almost feels like staring into a void and makes him uneasy enough that he had to look away. It would be rude if he had kept staring anyway. “Do you live here,” Steven asked.

The woman shook her head. “Nah. I just pass through a lot.” The woman leaned back against the counter and watched the rain with him in silence for a while. “You didn’t end up here by design,” the woman said more than asked.

“Yeah,” Steven said nervously. “I had to pull over. I couldn’t see where I was driving.”

The woman chuckled. “Smart thinking, kid.”

He hadn’t been called a kid for such a long time. “My name’s Steven. Steven Universe.” He held a hand out to her in a friendly gesture. The woman just stared at his hand for a moment, her eye scanning his face and body language as if trying to discern his motives.

“Cal,” the woman said after a quiet moment and shook his hand briefly. “There’s a motel down the road from here. Not far, about a minute drive. You might as well hole up there for the night since the weather’s not likely to let up until late.”

“Thanks. I guess I might as well.”

Cal just nodded, much like the man behind the counter did, and pulled some money out of the wallet inside of her jacket. A few bills were left on the counter top next to her cup before she started walking toward the door. “See you tomorrow Roger. Patty.”

The man behind the counter nodded, still not speaking a word and the old woman in the booth seat finally looked up from her book. “See ya t’morrow, sweet pea.”

Outside of the café, Cal disappeared around the corner of the building and came back a few minutes later with a motorcycle. A black helmet with a visor on it was now covering her head, her dark hair presumably tucked into it. The engine roared to life and eventually she took off down the road in the direction she had pointed him in when mentioning the motel.

The sky only seemed to be getting darker, indicating that the sun was setting despite the dark clouds still hanging about. _I should get going too_ , Steven thought, and began to rummage around his pockets for money to pay for the drink.

“Don’t sweat it, kid,” the man, Roger, said in a gruff, scratchy voice, “you’re covered. Now get out of here.”

“Really? Thank you.” Steven went on his way, but not before hearing something that he couldn’t tell if it was referring to him or not.

“The hooligans will be rollin’ through any day now, I’ll wager.”

“Better be loadin’ up yer old personal Peacekeeper, Roger.”


	2. Chapter 2

Steven wasn’t surprised that there were things in the world that went bump in the night, so to speak, but he never thought it would be so literal. Steven had gotten a room at the motel which was exactly where Cal had said it would be. There weren’t many people here but for some reason they had plenty of rooms and parking spots in the complex. “Maybe they used to be a popular traveling spot back in the day,” he thought aloud as he made his way to his room. It was good to get a hot shower and let his set of wet clothes dry. Maybe there was a laundromat here too and he could get some washing done.

But as the night progressed, Steven found that he had trouble sleeping in this place. It wasn’t that the bed was uncomfortable or that the area struck him as particularly dangerous, but his dreams that night were plagued by shadows that were darker than the night itself. They reached out and dragged unsuspecting people like Roger and Patty away, never to be seen again. The shadows were so thick that it seemed to swallow the light that only seemed to be emanating from where he stood and the bright circle around him was steadily shrinking. He could see eyes in the darkness, watching, waiting for the light to finally die away and leave him exposed. Gray, dirty claws skimmed tauntingly over the shield as he tried to raise his protective bubble around him and something rumbled in the darkness, sounding pleased by his growing helplessness.

Barbed tentacles shot out from the darkness and skewered the hand dragging its claws along the glowing pink barrier and the malevolent shadows seemed to boil with anger all around him. More of those barbed tentacles shot out from some unknown direction and into the shadows around him, seemingly dragging the darkness away. No, it wasn’t dragging away the darkness. It was dragging away the shadowed monsters that had crept out of it. It was dragging the monsters back into the dark where it felt like they belonged. Steven didn’t let down his shield even as the angry cacophony died down into pure silence and the light that shined down from somewhere above him was at a comfortable diameter again. He spun around, looking for the source of the barbed tentacles that had pushed the monsters back. He saw no tentacles but almost missed something because of how well it blended in with the shadows.

At the cusp where the darkness met the light, a figure stood just beyond the circle of light as if it were a line that shouldn’t be crossed. The shape was hard to discern, but Steven had the impression that it was person-shaped. A single glowing red dot, presumably the figure’s eye, stared at him silently. “Was that you who made the monsters go away,” Steven asked hesitantly. The figure shifted, bringing an arm up to its face and a cloud of smoke drifted out into the light. It smelled like cigarettes.

“It’s just a dream, kid,” the figure said in a distorted voice. “Don’t think about it too hard.”

And just like that, it was morning. Steven was by no means well-rested, but he wasn’t totally exhausted either. If nothing else, his mind was almost reeling from the odd dream the night before. He didn’t often have dreams for no reason and there was something he couldn’t shake from this one. Could he call Garnet? Would her future vision be able to work so far away from Beach City? He wouldn’t know unless he tried and so he called the landline in the house. It was no surprise to him that she picked up immediately.

“I don’t think you should stay there, Steven,” Garnet said almost immediately. “There’s some rough characters that will come through the town today but once they get there, I can’t see anything else that happens.”

“When you say you can’t see anything, do you mean that there’s nothing to see? Or-“

“Something’s blocking my future vision, yes.” Garnet was quiet for a moment. “You can tell me anything, Steven. I’m here for you.”

Steven hesitated for a moment and chewed his lip. “I had a weird dream last night, and you know how sometimes my dreams aren’t just dreams?” Garnet remained quiet, not wanting to rush him most likely. “There were shadows everywhere and,” Steven paused. “And my shield couldn’t hold them back. It was like I was being smothered by some oppressive darkness… But there was something else lurking there. Something- Someone was lurking in the shadows and they made the monsters go away. They made the shadows go back to where they… I guess where they belonged. It was like they were stuck there in the darkness though. They couldn’t come into the light.” Garnet remained silent still and it was starting to make him nervous. “Garnet?”

There was a pop of static on the line and a voice, low and menacing, rasped, “Who’s Garnet, Steven?”

Steven couldn’t help but jump to his feet, throwing the phone as the voice cackled wildly. In the back of his fear addled mind, Steven barely registered hearing Garnet calling his name from the phone but it didn’t stop him from bolting from the room, No, what jarred him back to reality was the door to his room being slammed shut in his face before he could get it open an inch. Whatever slammed the door shut had put enough force into it to knock him back on his butt. Steven could still hear voices, Garnet’s from the phone and someone barking angrily just outside the room.

“Steven? What’s going on?”

“I’ll call you back, Garnet. Something’s happening outside.” Steven ended the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket before peeking through the curtain covering the window beside the door. A familiar figure stood outside of Steven’s room, one hand down by her side and the other extended out in the direction of his room door. There were three people standing not far from her and it was her angry shouting he could hear.

“Take your bullshit somewhere else,” Cal snarled at the three burly looking men, “before one of you gets hurt.”

“Whatcha gonna do about it, bitch?”

Steven was about to go through the window if Cal wouldn’t let him through the door, but suddenly the men practically jumped out of their skin. He didn’t see or hear anything in particular but even he felt an ominous chill run up his spine. The men yelled, screamed even and cursed as they scrambled to their feet and as far away from Cal as fast as they could.

“Holy shit!”

“Stay away you fuckin’ freak!”

After a few moments, the screaming and cursing died away and Cal’s posture relaxed. She raised her left hand up to her face and in it was a still lit cigarette. She took a short puff of it before glancing back at him through the window. Steven dropped the curtain but couldn’t think of what had made him so hesitant to go outside now. It was someone he knew, sort of, and there was something oddly familiar about this. He mustered up what courage he could or rather what he felt like he needed and cautiously opened the door a crack. Steven could just make out Cal’s retreating form and burst out from the room. “Wait!” Cal stopped, taking another drag of the cigarette and just barely glanced back at him. “Uh, morning. Sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have yelled…”

Cal was quiet for a moment, then the barest hints of a chuckle escaped her. She turned to face him with a tired smile on her face and took another drag. “Morning, kid. I guess I should be the one apologizing for that.”

“What was that all about?” Cal gestured to the door and Steven closed it, finding a bullseye had been spray-painted on the worn wood at his chest level and several nick marks all over it. The men had been playing darts, just not using darts if the size of the marks were anything to go by. Steven swallowed thickly. Had Cal not slammed the door shut in his face, he might have been hit by something. But did any of this have anything to do with the strange phone incident?

“I was just passing by. Thought I’d scare them off before someone got hurt. Guess it was a good call.” Cal looked at the marks in the door, smoke fluttering from her nostrils. “You getting out of here kid?”

“Yeah,” Steven said, “that’s the plan. It looks like the weather will actually let me.” Steven laughed as he looked up at the bright, cloudless sky. “It looks like a nice day for a drive, but I might stick around for a few days and explore the town. What about you?”

Cal rubbed the back of her neck and looked out across the motel grounds. “Not just yet. I’m gonna hang out around here for a little while. I got a feeling something’s coming and I don’t feel right leaving.”

Steven looked back at the woman, wondering if maybe he wasn’t the only one who had a sort of sixth sense. “You mean like a dream?” He couldn’t quite read her expression and Cal remained quiet.

“Do you believe in stuff like that, kid?” The question sounded more like genuine curiosity rather than mockery.

“Personal experience tells me it’s a good idea to not ignore it completely.” Caligo looked at him again, as if trying to weigh the truth of his statement and Steven just smiled.

“Not like that,” Cal said after a moment. “It’s more like a change in the air. Or maybe the atmosphere. It’s like the mood of the entire town is different.”

Steven looked around the parking lot of the motel and out to the main highway that passed through the town. Whatever it was that Cal had picked up on, it was lost on him at this particular moment. The streets were quiet, hardly another car or person in sight and the weather was mild.

“Let’s get breakfast, kid. You shouldn’t hit the road on an empty stomach. The next decent town is about a hundred miles out in either direction in these parts.”

“Okay but I owe you.”

“Maybe next time, kid.”

Steven laughed. For some reason, it was almost joking more than looking down at him when Cal called him a kid. “I’m not much of a kid, trust me.”

“I know,” Cal grunted as they both began to walk toward the café. “Don’t take this the wrong way but you got that look in your eyes that makes me think of one. Well, least when you’re talking to someone.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means, when all you got is yourself to talk to you, ’re really trying to sort some heavy shit out.” Cal paused in her stride not far from the café before the sentence was fully out of her mouth and she frowned.

A long row of motorcycles and a few beaten up looking cars were scattered about the parking lot that the little café resided in. Whoever parked them didn’t seem to particularly care about whether anyone else had a stall or if they could maneuver without hitting one of the other vehicles. Several people who didn’t look like they lived in the town were strewn about, eating, drinking, and being generally loud. The café door was firmly shut but the stone-faced man from behind the counter was sitting in the window, watching the lot outside with disdain.

Cal made a sound of irritation. “It’s like walking through a fucking minefield,” the woman muttered as she made her way toward the café with Steven in tow.

Steven was hyper-aware of all the eyes on them. There were a few whistles, some nasty comments he tried not to focus on – a few were about his pink blazer, that was new – and a few were playing with some rather large knives, eyeing them as they walked past. Cal seemed unamused but also unphased by the people around them, though there was a growing oppressive feeling of dread in the air that seemed to grow stronger with every step they took. Maybe it was anger? It was hard to tell, but it made him uneasy. Steven did his best to keep his eyes ahead on the café door but he could swear, out of the corner of his vision, he saw shadows dancing along the ground all around them.

One of the people called after them from the parking lot just as they made it to the door, saying something that he didn’t quite understand but it made Cal’s entire body freeze in place. It wasn’t in fear. Steven didn’t need to know her that well to be able to tell that it was _rage_.

“Meet you inside, kid,” was all Cal said as she pushed him in through the door and turned back toward the parking lot.

Steven could swear, in the eye hidden beneath her hair, he saw a hint of black and red as she turned back toward the unlucky person who had called out to her that way.


End file.
